Shark fins do not have any taste of their own. Yet the status associated in Chinese society with earing shark fin soup is causing consumption to rise as the Chinese economy expands. Conservationists call it the single largest threat to sharks worldwide.

Radiation in the No. 1 reactor building at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan has been measured at the highest levels ever, making it virtually impossible for human workers to do much work there.

"With the rising Missouri River threatening to encroach a South Omaha sewage treatment plant, the City of Omaha will dump 6 million gallons of raw sewage a day into the river as it takes part of the plant off-line."

"'I watch them die, young and old,' [Spokane tribal gravedigger Harold] Campbell said. 'I think it’s caused by the radiation.' The radiation is from the Northwest’s only open-pit uranium mines -- an all-but-forgotten chapter of Washington’s Cold War history."